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Chinese billionaire and Alibaba founder Jack Ma believes that improper distribution of funds and hyper inflated US military spending, not globalization or other countries “stealing” US jobs, is behind the economic decline in America.

The Chinese business magnate earlier in January met with US President-elect Donald Trump, who has bemoaned the loss of American industry and jobs due to the outsourcing of labor to countries like Mexico and China. Ma, however, has a different view of what is behind the US economic decline.
“Over the past thirty years, the Americans had thirteen wars spending 40.2 trillion dollars,” said Ma, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “What if they spent a part of that money on building up the infrastructure, helping the white-collar and the blue-collar workers? No matter how strategically good it is, you’re supposed to spend money on your own people.”

“And the other money which I’m curious about is that when I was young, all I heard about America was Ford and Boeing and those big manufacturing companies. The last 10-20 years, all I heard about is Silicon Valley and Wall Street,” he continued.

“And what happened? The year 2008: the financial crisis wiped out 19.2 trillion dollars in the USA alone and destroyed 34 million jobs globally. So what if the spent on Wall Street and the Middle East was spent on the Mid-West of the United States, developing the industry there? That could change a lot.”

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute , the United States spent $596 billion, or 3.3 percent of its GDP, on military expenditure in 2015, which is higher than any other country in the world. In Ma’s opinion, this is partly responsible for the loss of jobs in America’s Rust Belt.
“So it’s not that other countries steal jobs from you guys, it is your strategy! You do not distribute the money in a proper way,” he summarized.

Ma also expressed the view that overall globalization was a positive thing as it had brought many benefits to both China and the world. However, it should be improved by making more room for small businesses rather than the current system run by the World Trade Organization (WTO), which was developed to protect corporate interests.

“The WTO was great but it was mainly designed for developed countries and big companies. There’s no opportunity for small business. We want to build up an EWTP – an Electronic World Trade Platform – to support young people, small business.”

“And the other thing is that the WTO is a very interesting organization. When you put 200 government officials in one room, ask them to agree on something – it’s impossible! I can never imagine that they agree on something together. Business should be designed by business people, so we believe the EWTP should have businessmen sitting down together, agree on something, negotiate on something, then get endorsement from the government.” Ma founded Alibaba, one of the world’s largest online retailers and e-commerce platforms, back in 1999. According to Forbes, Ma has a net worth of approximately 27.7 billion dollars, making him the second-richest man in China.

The Trump administration wants to revamp and rename a U.S. government program designed to counter all violent ideologies so that it focuses solely on Islamist extremism, five people briefed on the matter told Reuters.

The program, "Countering Violent Extremism," or CVE, would be changed to "Countering Islamic Extremism" or "Countering Radical Islamic Extremism," the sources said, and would no longer target groups such as white supremacists who have also carried out bombings and shootings in the United States.

Such a change would reflect Trump's election campaign rhetoric and criticism of former President Barack Obama for being weak in the fight against Islamic State and for refusing to use the phrase "radical Islam" in describing it. Islamic State has claimed responsibility for attacks on civilians in several countries.

The CVE program aims to deter groups or potential lone attackers through community partnerships and educational programs or counter-messaging campaigns in cooperation with companies such as Google and Facebook.

Some proponents of the program fear that rebranding it could make it more difficult for the government to work with Muslims already hesitant to trust the new administration, particularly after Trump issued an executive order last Friday temporarily blocking travel to the United States from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

Still, the CVE program, which focuses on U.S. residents and is separate from a military effort to fight extremism online, has been criticized even by some supporters as ineffective.

A source who has worked closely with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on the program said Trump transition team members first met with a CVE task force in December and floated the idea of changing the name and focus.

In a meeting last Thursday attended by senior staff for DHS Secretary John Kelly, government employees were asked to defend why they chose certain community organizations as recipients of CVE program grants, said the source, who requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the discussions.

Although CVE funding has been appropriated by Congress and the grant recipients were notified in the final days of the Obama administration, the money still may not go out the door, the source said, adding that Kelly is reviewing the matter.

The department declined comment. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

PROGRAM CRITICIZED

Some Republicans in Congress have long assailed the program as politically correct and ineffective, asserting that singling out and using the term "radical Islam" as the trigger for many violent attacks would help focus deterrence efforts.

Others counter that branding the problem as "radical Islam" would only serve to alienate more than three million Americans who practice Islam peacefully.

Many community groups, meanwhile, had already been cautious about the program, partly over concerns that it could double as a surveillance tool for law enforcement.

Hoda Hawa, director of policy for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said she was told last week by people within DHS that there was a push to refocus the CVE effort from tackling all violent ideology to only Islamist extremism.

"That is concerning for us because they are targeting a faith group and casting it under a net of suspicion," she said.

Another source familiar with the matter was told last week by a DHS official that a name change would take place. Three other sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said such plans had been discussed but were unable to attest whether they had been finalized.

The Obama administration sought to foster relationships with community groups to engage them in the counterterrorism effort. In 2016, Congress appropriated $10 million in grants for CVE efforts and DHS awarded the first round of grants on Jan. 13, a week before Trump was inaugurated.

Among those approved were local governments, city police departments, universities and non-profit organizations. In addition to organizations dedicated to combating Islamic State's recruitment in the United States, grants also went to Life After Hate, which rehabilitates former neo-Nazis and other domestic extremists.

Just in the past two years, authorities blamed radical and violent ideologies as the motives for a white supremacist's shooting rampage inside a historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina and Islamist militants for shootings and bombings in California, Florida and New York.

One grant recipient, Leaders Advancing & Helping Communities, a Michigan-based group led by Lebanese-Americans, has declined a $500,000 DHS grant it had sought, according to an email the group sent that was seen by Reuters. A representative for the group confirmed the grant had been rejected but declined further comment.

"Given the current political climate and cause for concern, LAHC has chosen to decline the award," said the email, which was sent last Thursday, a day before Trump issued his immigration order, which was condemned at home and abroad as discriminating against Muslims while the White House said it was to "to protect the American people from terrorist attacks by foreign nationals."

There seems to be considerable urgency right now to enshrine Donald Trump’s Islamophobia into law.Talk of an immigration ban, a Muslim registry and even internment camps once sounded like the machinations of a spray-tanned salesman looking to indulge the electorate’s need for a good villain narrative. Amid an atmosphere of overwhelming chaos, the early days of Trump’s reign have made clear, however, that Islam is Public Enemy No. 1 and serves as the centerpiece of Steve Bannon’s ethno-nationalist agenda. (Trump’s ban on immigration and travel from certain Muslim-majority nations is currently on hold, thanks to a Friday federal court order. That does nothing to resolve the larger questions.)

Bannon called Trump “a blunt instrument for us” in an interview last summer with Vanity Fair. He added, “I don’t know whether he really gets it or not.” That the former Breitbart executive editor would have an outsized role in a Trump administration should have been evident long ago. In Trump, Bannon found a petulant Twitterphile and a manipulable tool who has minimal interest in policymaking and little insight into his own limitations. As he sought an upheaval to remake an America rife with perceived threats, Trump was, as Lawrence Douglas wrote, “the proper vehicle to carry the fight forward.”

For Bannon, the fight is against Islam. There are echoes of Samuel Huntington’s 1993 essay in Foreign Affairs called “The Clash of Civilizations?” Huntington wrote of a world that had been divided along “fault lines” such as culture, which could spur conflict between Islamic civilization and the West. Bannon speaks of the current war with “jihadist Islamic fascism” in apocalyptic terms and sees it as the latest iteration, as Uri Friedman wrote, “of an existential, centuries old-struggle between the Judeo-Christian West and the Islamic world.”

Further, Muslim immigration gnaws at Trump’s foremost consigliere. He evinces ignorance in his ideas about sharia, yet uses the term frequently when discussing Muslimimmigrants, who “are not people with thousands of years of democracy in their DNA.” Though roughly 100,000 Muslims have entered the United States in each of the last few years, he claimed in December 2015 that 1 million would be entering in each of the next two years.

These statements were a prelude to Trump’s “Muslim ban,” an executive order that was signed shortly after inauguration (and is now on hold, at least for the moment). Its swift enactment was the first sign that Bannon’s war on Islam had begun. He hastily crafted the ban without regard for the Department of Homeland Security — or for that matter the State, Defense and Justice departments. Soon court orders were being defied and acting attorney general Sally Yates was fired for her refusal to enforce Bannon’s opening salvo. Christian refugees would be given priority over others to enter the country, as an individual’s religious identity is apparently the only indicator of his or her suffering.

Bannon’s temerity was on full display as he sought to engineer the civilizational crisis that he has clearly relished for years. His consolidation of power was complete when Trump took the unprecedented step of offering Bannon — a man with no experience or background in national security, foreign policy or the military — a permanent seat on the National Security Council. (Yes, Bannon was once a Navy officer. He left the service in 1983.) Now the man who admires darkness, Satan and Darth Vader will influence major decisions of war and peace.

All this unrestrained jingoism risks causing a conflagration at a time of isolated fires that are being managed and contained adequately. As Robin Wright of the New Yorker noted, the Obama administration “has turned the tide on jihadism over the past two years. The two premier movements — the Islamic State and Al Qaeda — are both on the defensive.” In the United States, attacks by Muslims were responsible for only one-third of 1 percent of all murders in 2016.Even Bernard Lewis, who fathered the phrase “clash of civilizations” when he wrote of the Arab world’s need to expunge Islam from its politics, cautioned against an exaggerated response to the Judeo-Christian world’s ancient rival. “It is crucially important,” he noted, “that we on our side should not be provoked into an equally historic but equally irrational reaction against that rival.”

But Bannon desires carnage.

Through the immigration ban and its associated rhetoric, jihadists and at least seven Muslim-majority countries have been given notice of the Trump administration’s intentions. This is a not a U.S. government that will call Islam a religion of peace, as George W. Bush did. Or one that will be reluctant to use the term “Islamic” to prevent giving groups like ISIS legitimacy, as Barack Obama did.

Yet ISIS is emboldened now because Bannon’s undaunted pursuit of a clash will help its goal to“eliminate the gray zone” of coexistence between Muslims residing in the West and their non-Muslim neighbors. ISIS hopes that Bannon’s stark intentions will make Muslims in the West disillusioned about its acceptance and tolerance, boosting recruitment and sympathy for their deranged cause. As Abu Omar Khorasani, a senior Islamic State commander in Afghanistan, said, “This guy [Trump] is a complete maniac. His utter hate towards Muslims will make our job much easier because we can recruit thousands.”

In addition, as Dan Byman, a staff member of the 9/11 commission, noted, Muslims in the United States may become more disenchanted “and thus easier to recruit or inspire to be lone wolves. In addition, it may make communities feel they are suspect and decrease vital cooperation with law enforcement. The hostile rhetoric that goes with these bans makes all this more likely.”

A couple of years ago, those at Activist Post reported on a compiled list-by-year of each American war, and now that 2016 has come and gone, and there’s been a change of oligarchical puppets in the White House, we’ve provided an update to the Activist Post’s list below.

After 240 years, the United States can only boast a dreadful 21-years of peace (if you don’t count slavery). The following four facts were listed, and they’re still valid in 2017:

Pick any year since 1776 and there is about a 91% chance [more now] that America was involved in some war during that calendar year.

No U.S. president truly qualifies as a peacetime president. Instead, all U.S. presidents can technically be considered “war presidents.” [This now includes Trump]

The U.S. has never gone a decade without war.

The only time the U.S. went five years without war (1935-40) was during the isolationist period of the Great Depression.

1801 – First Barbary War
1802 – First Barbary War
1803 – First Barbary War
1804 – First Barbary War
1805 – First Barbary War

1806 – Sabine Expedition

1807 – No major war1808 – No major war1809 – No major war

1810 – U.S. occupies Spanish-held West Florida
1811 – Tecumseh’s War

1812 – War of 1812, Tecumseh’s War, Seminole Wars, U.S. occupies Spanish-held Amelia Island and other parts of East Florida
1813 – War of 1812, Tecumseh’s War, Peoria War, Creek War, U.S. expands its territory in West Florida
1814 – War of 1812, Creek War, U.S. expands its territory in Florida, Anti-piracy war
1815 – War of 1812, Second Barbary War, Anti-piracy war

1979 – Cold War (CIA proxy war in Afghanistan)
1980 – Cold War (CIA proxy war in Afghanistan)
1981 – Cold War (CIA proxy war in Afghanistan and Nicaragua), First Gulf of Sidra Incident
1982 – Cold War (CIA proxy war in Afghanistan and Nicaragua), Conflict in Lebanon
1983 – Cold War (Invasion of Grenada, CIA proxy war in Afghanistan and Nicaragua), Conflict in Lebanon
1984 – Cold War (CIA proxy war in Afghanistan and Nicaragua), Conflict in Persian Gulf
1985 – Cold War (CIA proxy war in Afghanistan and Nicaragua)
1986 – Cold War (CIA proxy war in Afghanistan and Nicaragua)

2001 – War on Terror in Afghanistan
2002 – War on Terror in Afghanistan and Yemen
2003 – War on Terror in Afghanistan, and Iraq
2004 – War on Terror in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Yemen
2005 – War on Terror in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Yemen
2006 – War on Terror in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Yemen
2007 – War on Terror in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen
2008 – War on Terror in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Yemen
2009 – War on Terror in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Yemen
2010 – War on Terror in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Yemen
2011 – War on Terror in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen; Conflict in Libya (Libyan Civil War)
2012 – War on Terror in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen
2013 – War on Terror in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen
2014 – War on Terror in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen; War on ISIL in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Nigeria
2015 – War on Terror in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen; War on ISIL in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Nigeria; War in
Afghanistan
2016 – War on Terror in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen; War on ISIL in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Nigeria; War in Afghanistan

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has been calling for the cancellation of the debt since President Donald Trump was elected, rejected paying it, saying, "I have not sent an official letter to Trump asking him to cancel the debt … They brought bombs and dropped them on Cambodia and (now) demand Cambodian people to pay.”

Speaking at a conference earlier this month, Sen, a former commander with Cambodian communists, slammed recent comments made by U.S. Ambassador to Cambodia William Heidt about repayment, and recalled the atrocities committed by the United States in the 1970s.

“They dropped bombs on our heads and then ask up to repay. When we do not repay, they tell the IMF (International Monetary Fund) not to lend us money," Sen said. "We should raise our voices to talk about the issue of the country that has invaded other (countries) and has killed children."

In the late 1960s, the United States gave Cambodia a US$274 million loan, mostly for food supplies to the U.S.-backed Lon Nol government who had taken over the country in a coup a year earlier. The debt has almost doubled since then, as Cambodia has refused to enter into a repayment program.

As Nol fought against the Khmer Rouge between 1970 and 1975, U.S. fighter jets carried out secret carpet-bombings against the group in support of the right-wing government, killing more than 500,000 people, many of them women and children. After the Khmer Rouge took over the country in 1975, more than 2 million people died as a result of political executions, disease and forced labor, and many credited U.S. imperialism in the region for fueling the death toll.

During his tenure as prime minister since 1998, Sen has called for the United States to drop the "dirty debt" several times, but U.S. leaders have refused.

It has never been more important to acknowledge the history of fascism and neo-fascism in America

America is currently experiencing a wave of increasingly aggressive far-right and neo-fascist activism. Observers have routinely considered fascism an ideology alien to American society. Yet it has deeper roots in American history than most of us have been willing to acknowledge.

Consider the interwar period. The crisis years of the 1920s and 1930s not only gave rise to fascist movements across Europe – a moment captured in Ernst Nolte’s classic The Three Faces of Fascism – but around the globe. The United States was no exception.

Across the country, fascist and proto-fascist groups sprang up. The most prominent among them was the paramilitary Silver Shirts movement, founded by William Dudley Pelley, a radical journalist from Massachusetts, in 1933.

Obsessed with fantasies about a Jewish-Communist world conspiracy and fears about an African American corruption of American culture, its followers promoted racism, extreme nationalism, violence and the ideal of an aggressive masculinity. They competed against various other militant fringe groups, from the Khaki Shirt movement, which aimed to build a paramilitary force of army veterans to stage a coup, to the paramilitary Black Legion, feared for its assassinations, bombings and acts of arson.

An important role in this history was played by radicalized parts of the Italian and German American community. Inspired by the ascent of Mussolini, some Italian Americans founded numerous fascist groups, which were eventually united under the Fascist League of North America.

"Many commentators still feel uneasy speaking about fascism in America. They consider fascism to be foreign to US society"

Even bigger was Fritz Julius Kuhn’s German-American Bund, founded in 1936. Its members considered themselves patriotic Americans. At their meetings the American flag stood beside the Swastika banner. At a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York on 20 February 1939, a crowd of 20,000 listened to Kuhn attacking President Franklin D Roosevelt, referring to him as “Frank D Rosenfeld” and calling his New Deal a “Jew Deal”.

The gathering ended in violent clashes between protesters and participants. Similar riots took place on the west coast. The New York Times reported: “Disorders attendant upon Nazi rallies in New York and Los Angeles this week again focused attention upon the Nazi movement in the United States and inspired conjectures as to its strength and influence.”

To be sure, most of these groups were peripheral. And yet historians have shown that the appeal of fascism among many Americans in the interwar years should not be underestimated. The ideology found prominent supporters, from the writer Ezra Pound, who from Italy called Americans for an alliance with Mussolini, to the aviator Charles Lindbergh, who in the 1940s campaigned against Washington’s entry into the war.

"When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labelled ‘made in Germany’"

Fascist agitators published widely circulated newspapers and aired radio shows, which reached millions, preaching virulent antisemitism, nativism and anti-Communism. Many of them had no obvious links to their fascist counterparts in Europe and cushioned their message with American nativism and Christian piety.

“When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labelled ‘made in Germany’; it will not be marked with a swastika,” a US reporter warned urgently in 1938. “It will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, ‘Americanism’.” Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here, published a few years earlier, had made a similar point.

"White nationalist and neo-fascist movements in the US have grown by 600% on social media, outperforming Isis "

During the second world war, American fascists suffered a serious blow. At the great sedition trial of 1944, some of the movement’s key proponents were charged with treason. In the postwar years, however, scores of new groups emerged. Some saw themselves in the tradition of the interwar period, such as the American Nazi party, founded in 1959 by the flamboyant war veteran George Lincoln Rockwell, which copied its ideology and iconography from Germany’s Nazi party.

Yet many of these groups transformed and began to look very different from their predecessors of the 1930s. Not all wore jackboots, armbands and uniforms any more. Not all assembled at torch rallies. They embraced new discourses of globalization, migration and multiculturalism. Today, neo-fascism has many faces, with movements ranging from neo-Nazis to neo-Confederates to segments of the alt-right.

The United States has never been immune to fascism. But many commentators still feel uneasy speaking about fascism in America. They still consider fascism to be foreign to American society. They often assume that American exceptionalism makes the country immune to any fascist threat. Fascism has no place in our master narrative of American history. Conversely, in most global histories of fascism, America is no more than a footnote.

And yet it has never been more important to acknowledge the history of fascism and neo-fascism in America than it is today. Over the last five years, according to a recent study by George Washington University, white nationalist and neo-fascist movements in the US have grown by 600% on Twitter, outperforming Isis in nearly every category, from follower numbers to numbers of tweets.

Although they remain fringe groups, Trump’s victory has given them new confidence. Never in history have they felt more empowered. Many of them saw his election as their victory. The chorus of support ranges from the American Nazi party supremo, Rocky Suhayda, who sees Trump as a “real opportunity”, to the white supremacist leader David Duke, who said he was “100% behind” Trump.

They cheered as he failed to mention Jews on Holocaust Remembrance Day. They cheered as he refused to condemn the Minnesota mosque attack. They cheered as he relativized the rightwing violence by blaming “all sides” after the murder in Charlottesville. It is perhaps the first time in American history that the racist far-right sees the elites in the White House as its allies.

Trump has long done little to distance himself from these groups. In fact, he has all too often shamelessly tapped into their discourses, using dog-whistles, and continues to maintain a tacit, though increasingly shaky, alliance with them.

More than a decade ago, the historian Robert Paxton, well versed in the long history of fascism and neo-fascism in America, warned in his important book The Anatomy of Fascism about the “catastrophic setbacks and polarization” which “the United States would have to suffer” if “these fringe groups” were “to find powerful allies and enter the mainstream” of American politics.
His words may turn out to be prophetic.

David Motadel is an assistant professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science

US justice is built to humiliate and oppress black men. And it starts with the chokehold

The author of the acclaimed Chokehold: Policing Black Men writes on how the system treats African Americans with contempt: ‘If police patrolled white areas as they do poor black neighborhoods, there would be a revolution’

Chokehold: a maneuver in which a person’s neck is tightly gripped in a way that restrains breathing. A person left in a chokehold for more than a few seconds can die.

The former police chief of Los Angeles Daryl Gates once suggested that there is something about the anatomy of African Americans that makes them especially susceptible to serious injury from chokeholds, because their arteries do not open as fast as arteries do on “normal people.” The truth is any human being will suffer distress when pressure on the carotid arteries interrupts the supply of blood from the heart to the brain. Many police departments in the United States have banned chokeholds, but this does not stop some officers from using them when they perceive a threat.

The United States supreme court decided a case about chokeholds that tells you everything you need to know about how criminal “justice” works for African American men.

In 1976, Adolph Lyons, a 24-year-old black man, was pulled over by four Los Angeles police officers for driving with a broken taillight. The cops exited their squad cars with their guns drawn, ordering Lyons to spread his legs and put his hands on top of his head.

After Lyons was frisked, he put his hands down, causing one cop to grab Lyons’s hands and slam them against his head. Lyons had been holding his keys and he complained that he was in pain. The police officer tackled Lyons and placed him in a chokehold until he blacked out. When Lyons regained consciousness, he was lying facedown on the ground, had soiled his pants, and was spitting up blood and dirt. The cops gave him a traffic citation and sent him on his way.

Lyons sued to make the LAPD stop putting people in chokeholds. He presented evidence that in recent years 16 people – including 12 black men – had died in LAPD custody after being placed in chokeholds. In City of Los Angeles v Lyons, the US supreme court denied his claim, holding that because Lyons could not prove that he would be subject to a chokehold in the future, he had no “personal stake in the outcome”. Dissenting from the court’s opinion, Thurgood Marshall, the first African American on the supreme court, wrote:

“It is undisputed that chokeholds pose a high and unpredictable risk of serious injury or death. Chokeholds are intended to bring a subject under control by causing pain and rendering him unconscious. Depending on the position of the officer’s arm and the force applied, the victim’s voluntary or involuntary reaction, and his state of health, an officer may inadvertently crush the victim’s larynx, trachea, or hyoid. The result may be death caused by either cardiac arrest or asphyxiation. An LAPD officer described the reaction of a person to being choked as “do[ing] the chicken”, in reference apparently to the reactions of a chicken when its neck is wrung.”

The work of police is to preserve law and order, including the racial order. Hillary Clinton once asked a room full of white people to imagine how they would feel if police and judges treated them the way African Americans are treated. If the police patrolled white communities with the same violence that they patrol poor black neighborhoods, there would be a revolution.

The purpose of my book, Chokehold, is to inspire the same outrage about what the police do to African Americans, and the same revolution in response.

A chokehold is a process of coercing submission that is self-reinforcing. A chokehold justifies additional pressure on the body because the body does not come into compliance, but the body cannot come into compliance because of the vise grip that is on it.

This is the black experience in the United States. This is how the process of law and order pushes African American men into the criminal system. This is how the system is broke on purpose.

•••

There has never, not for one minute in American history, been peace between black people and the police. And nothing since slavery – not Jim Crow segregation, not lynching, not restrictive covenants in housing, not being shut out of New Deal programs like social security and the GI bill, not massive white resistance to school desegregation, not the ceaseless efforts to prevent blacks from voting – nothing has sparked the level of outrage among African Americans as when they have felt under violent attack by the police.

Most of the times that African Americans have set aside traditional civil rights strategies like bringing court cases and marching peacefully and instead have rioted in the streets and attacked symbols of the state have been because of something the police have done. Watts in 1965, Newark in 1967, Miami in 1980, Los Angeles in 1992, Ferguson in 2015, Baltimore in 2016, Charlotte in 2016 – each of these cities went up in flames sparked by the police killing a black man.

The problem is the criminal process itself.

Cops routinely hurt and humiliate black people because that is what they are paid to do. Virtually every objective investigation of a US law enforcement agency finds that the police, as policy, treat African Americans with contempt.
In New York, Baltimore, Ferguson, Chicago, Los Angeles, Cleveland, San Francisco, and many other cities, the US justice department and federal courts have stated that the official practices of police departments include violating the rights of African Americans. The police kill, wound, pepper spray, beat up, detain, frisk, handcuff, and use dogs against blacks in circumstances in which they do not do the same to white people.

It is the moral responsibility of every American, when armed agents of the state are harming people in our names, to ask why.•••

Every black man in America faces a symbolic chokehold every time he leaves his home. The sight of an unknown black man scares people, and the law responds with a set of harsh practices of surveillance, control and punishment designed to put down the threat.

The people who carry out the chokehold include cops, judges, and politicians. But it’s not just about the government. It’s also about you. People of all races and ethnicities make the most consequential and the most mundane decisions based on the chokehold. It impacts everything from the neighborhood you choose to live in and who you marry to where you look when you get on an elevator.

I like hoodies, but I won’t wear one, and it’s not mainly because of the police. It’s because when I put on a hoodie everybody turns into a neighborhood watch person. When the sight of a black man makes you walk quicker or check to see if your car door is locked, you are enforcing the chokehold.

You are not alone. As an African American man, I’m not only the target of the chokehold. I’ve also been one of its perpetrators. I’ve done so officially – as a prosecutor who sent a lot of black men to prison.I represented the government in criminal court and defended cops who had racially pro-led or used excessive force.Many of those prosecutions I now regret. I can’t turn back time, but I can expose a morally bankrupt system. That’s one reason I wrote this book.

But before I get too high and mighty, you should know that I’ve also enforced the chokehold outside my work as a prosecutor. I am a black man who at times is afraid of other black men. And then I get mad when people act afraid of me.
Other times I have been more disgusted or angry with some of my brothers than scared. I read the news articles about “black-on-black” homicide in places like Chicago and Los Angeles. I listen to some hip-hop music that seems to celebrate thug life. And as a kid I got bullied by other black males. Sometimes I think if brothers would just do right, we would not have to worry about people being afraid of us. I have wondered if we have brought the chokehold on ourselves.
In my years as a prosecutor, I learned some inside information that I am now willing to share. Some of it will blow your mind, but I don’t feel bad for telling tales out of school. I was on the front lines in carrying out the chokehold. Now I want to be on the front lines in helping to crush it.

My creds to write this book don’t come just from my experience as a law enforcement officer, my legal training at Harvard, or the more than 20 years I have spent researching criminal justice. I learned as much as an African American man who got arrested for a crime I did not commit – during the time that I served as a federal prosecutor. I didn’t beat my case because I was innocent, even though I was. I beat my case because I knew how to work the system.

The chokehold does not stem from hate of African Americans. Its anti-blackness is instrumental rather than emotional. As slaves built the White House, the chokehold builds the wealth of white elites. Discriminatory law enforcement practices such as stop and frisk, mass incarceration, and the war on drugs are key components of the political economy of the United States. After the civil rights movement of the 1960s stigmatized overt racism, the national economy, which from the founding has been premised on a racialized form of capitalism, still required black bodies to exploit. The chokehold evolved as a “color-blind” method of keeping African Americans down, and then blaming them for their own degradation. The rap group Public Enemy said: “It takes a nation of millions to hold us back.”
Actually all it takes is the chokehold. It is the invisible fist of the law.

The chokehold means that what happens in places like Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland – where the police routinely harass and discriminate against African American – is not a flaw in the criminal justice system. Ferguson and Baltimore are examples of how the system is supposed to work. The problem is not bad-apple cops. The problem is police work itself. American cops are the enforcers of a criminal justice regime that targets black men and sets them up to fail.

The chokehold is how the police get away with shooting unarmed black people. Cops are rarely prosecuted because they are, literally, doing their jobs. This is why efforts to fix “problems” such as excessive force and racial profiling are doomed to fail. If it’s not broke, you can’t fix it. Police violence and selective enforcement are not so much flaws in American criminal justice as they are integral features of it. The chokehold is why, legally speaking, black lives don’t matter as much as white lives.

The whole world knows that the United States faces a crisis in racial justice, but the focus on police and mass incarceration is too narrow. We might be able to fix those problems the way that we “ fixed” slavery and segregation, but the chokehold’s genius is its mutability. Throughout the existence of America, there have always been legal ways to keep black people down. Slavery bled into the old Jim Crow; the old Jim Crew bled into the new Jim Crow. In order to halt this wretched cycle we must not think of reform – we must think of transformation. The United States of America must be disrupted, and made anew. This book uses the experience of African American men to explain why.

One of the consequences of the chokehold is mass incarceration, famously described by Michelle Alexander as “the new Jim Crow”. The chokehold also brings us police tactics such as stop and frisk, which are designed to humiliate African American males – to bring them into submission. The chokehold demands a certain kind of performance from a black man every time he leaves his home. He must affirmatively demonstrate – to the police and the public at large –that he is not a threat. Most African American men follow the script. Black men who are noncompliant suffer the consequences.

The chokehold is perfectly legal. Like all law, it promotes the interests of the rich and powerful. In any system marked by inequality, there are winners and losers. Because the chokehold imposes racial order, who wins and who loses is based on race.

White people are the winners. What they win is not only material, like the cash money that arresting African Americans brings to cities all over the country in fines and court costs. The criminalizing of blackness also brings psychic rewards. American criminal justice enhances the property value of whiteness.

As the chokehold subordinates black men, it improves the status of white people. It works as an enforcement mechanism for keeping the black man in his place literally as well as figuratively. Oh the places African American men don’t go because of the chokehold. It frees up urban space for coffeehouses and beer gardens.

But it’s not just the five-dollar latte crowd that wins. The chokehold is something like an employment stimulus plan for working-class white people, who don’t have to compete for jobs with all the black men who are locked up, or who are underground because they have outstanding arrest warrants, or who have criminal records that make obtaining legal employment exceedingly difficult. Poor white people are simply not locked up at rates similar to African Americans. These benefits make crushing the chokehold more difficult because if it ends, white people lose – at least in the short term.

Progressives often lambast poor white people for voting for conservative Republicans like Donald Trump, suggesting that those votes are not in their best interests. But low-income white folks might have better sense than pundits give them credit for. A vote for a conservative is an investment in the property value of one’s whiteness. The criminal process makes white privilege more than just a status symbol, and more than just a partial shield from the criminal process (as compared to African Americans). Black men are locked up at five times the rate of white men. There are more African Americans in the US criminal justice system than there were slaves in 1850.

By reducing competition for jobs, and by generating employment in law enforcement and corrections, especially in the mainly white rural areas where prisons are often located, the chokehold delivers cash money to many working-class white people.

The chokehold relegates black men to an inferior status of citizenship. We might care about that as a moral issue, or as an issue of racial justice. But honestly, many people will not give a **** for those reasons. African Americans have been second-class citizens since we were allowed – after the bloodiest war in US history and an amendment to the constitution – to become citizens at all.

The political scientist Lisa Miller has described the United States as a “failed state” for African Americans. Indeed some activists involved in the movement for black lives speak of their work as creating a “Black Spring”, similar to the Arab Spring movements that attempted to bring democracy to some Middle Eastern countries.

We face a crucial choice. Do we allow the chokehold to continue to strangle our democracy and risk the rebellion that always comes to police states? Or do we transform the United States of America into the true multiracial democracy that, at our best, we aspire to be? My book is about the urgency of transformation. All of the people will be free, or none of them will. “All the way down, this time.”